After googling..Ah, so that's a bitcoin (see introductory video here: http://www.weusecoins.com/). Though I still don't understand it completely, why would you want to trade it?

I would seriously worry about security:

The storm had been building for over a week now. Last Monday at around 5 p.m. 25,000 Bitcoins were transferred from 478 accounts on the currency's largest exchange -- Mt. Gox. But that was just the beginning. Now Mt. Gox is admitting to a major breach and has shut down, in an unprecedented action. In all, approximately $8.75M USD worth of Bitcoins appear to have -- at least temporarily -- been stolen in the intrusion.[...]One account with a lot of coins was compromised and whoever stole it (using a HK based IP to login) first sold all the coins in there, to buy those again just after, and then tried to withdraw the coins. The $1000/day withdraw limit was active for this account and the hacker could only get out with $1000 worth of coins.[...]Ultimately, the massive breach may not be enough to kill the Bitcoin movement. After all, many people are very dedicated and enthusiastic about the concept of Bitcoins.

That said, the recent volatility, combined with this breach raise serious doubts about Bitcoin managing to become mainstream. The fact that the largest exchange in a $130M USD would practice such lax security practices such as failing to use the state of the art hashing methods to protect its database seems disturbing.

For the interested readers, FT Alphaville has written some excellent articles in the past week about BitcoinMania (requires a free registration).

A connection to Bitfinex, ICBIT, or MPEx bitcoin exchanges could be more interesting, since according to this article those 'exchanges' also allow shorting of bitcoins. (Not that I advocate trading Bitcoins with MultiCharts, but just saying that an exchange with shorting possibilities is also important).

In case the bitcoin chart doesn't scream "bubble alert" enough, there is also a 'bitcoin hedge fund' launched.

Tresor, do you trade Bitcoins by the way? It would be interesting to hear how that works in practice, especially since there are almost 11 million coins 'created' (according to this page), so it will be a 'thin' market in terms of market depth? (I could only find real-time market depth here, and it's weekend now so not indicative of true market conditions)

This Bitcoin crash was caused by so fast rise demand of bitcoins that the fundamentals of Bitcoin ( maximum limit of 21 million bitcoins to be created ) could not support the price explosion.

Technically the crash was parabolic price exhaustion. That rare formation happens only with steadily growing manic buying to the point that prices can no more rise more steeplyturning mania to full panic. With more steadily growing demand for Bitcoin that kind of crash could not have happened.

If the interest for Bitcoin grows also due the increasing inflation of many other currenciesthen the Bitcoin will soon recover and possibly more parabolic price failures may follow.

This all tells not of any fundamental weakness of Bitcoin as such. Therefore Bitcoin datafeed should be considered as well as Litecoin datafeed.

Also the the amount of Litecoins in circulation will be fixed after the initial growth of the total quantity of Litecoins released to circulation.

If the fundamental value of any currency is determined by the total amount of it issued to circulation compared to the amount of goods traded by it -- fixed quantity currencies are destined to explode in their value unless hackers and governments can effectively sabotage these currencies.

Morphicresonance wrote:If the interest for Bitcoin grows also due the increasing inflation of many other currenciesthen the Bitcoin will soon recover and possibly more parabolic price failures may follow.

Morphicresonance wrote:Therefore Bitcoin datafeed should be considered as well as Litecoin datafeed.

+1 for Litecoin

MC Team, Your competitor, MT has a dominant position in forex trading (they were on this market before you). Now you could establish your position in cyber currency trading - your potential entering the new market (where no other recognizable trading frontend yet accomodated) could give you a dominant position there (if you are quick).

I will soon get my feet wet with Bitcoins. I opened an account at MtGox 3 weeks ago. They get 2 - 3 thousand new customers per day so the verification procedure took very long time. When I signed up I was 29,000th in the queue to be verified. Madness.------------------------------------------------------------Stan, this is what needs to be done if MC team decides to investigate adding MtGox and bitcoin charting / trading:

1. Open an account at MtGox (there is no need for you to fund this account) https://mtgox.com/ It will take a minute.

2. Through their website you can set the API to give you access to data feed and / or trading gateway.

3. This is the thread that discusses the API: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=164404.0;alland this one:https://bitbucket.org/nitrous/mtgox-api ... background------------------------------------------------------------FYI MtGox has a few hundred thousand clients (I think it is more then Oanda you once hoped to add to a list of supported brokers) and these clients have no access to any charting software supporting Bitcoin (except for trials at SC), I just thought you might be interested in expanding to the cryptocurrency market.

If you can arrange for real-time Bitcoin charts on this website, I could immediately transmit this info to at least 100k people.

At the moment there is only one medium quality website that displays BTCUSD data, but charts there do not show other indicators than Volume and do not allow for applying basic objects to charts, e.g. trendlines.

If you can arrange for real-time Bitcoin charts on this website, I could immediately transmit this info to at least 100k people.

At the moment there is only one medium quality website that displays BTCUSD data, but charts there do not show other indicators than Volume and do not allow for applying basic objects to charts, e.g. trendlines.

templ wrote:But I would like "realtime" BID/ASK data from mtgox, bitstamp and btc-e and kraken.

BTCChina is also a big exchange. Kraken is the youngest exchange and most trader-friendly: stop losses, trailing stops, etc.

Note, BTC is not the only tradable cryptocurrency. There about 30 more.

Note, there are also other cryptoassets, like bonds, shares.

templ wrote:So, where is MC?

MC is a complex piece of software. It has features for complicated stuff like contract roll-overs, and whatnots. I never used more than 5% of MC's capabilities. Cryptocurrency traders wouldn't know what to do with it.

Cryptocurrencies (compared to forex and futures) are easy: 365/365 24/7, no roll-overs, no big point values, no strange 1/1000000 forex scales, etc. There is no need for heavy pieces of software in crypto. MC would be an overkill. In my revised opinion, there is no need for MC in crypto trading.

Tradingview on the other hand fits perfectly. It is the best tool on the market right now. I use it.

bjornc wrote:when i try to select import from asci : I cannot klick the OK button.. although it seems to recognize what's in it..

any tips?

Each data resolution requires certain fields to be present in the file for importing/mapping the file:"Date","Time","Price" are the necessary fields for tick data;"Date","Time","Open", "High", "Low", "Close" are the necessary fields for minute data; "Date","Open", "High", "Low", "Close" are the necessary fields for daily data.

Please make sure your file has the requried data fields and thay can be read by the MultiCharts ASCII import engine. For more information please see Importing Data.

i try that and the history is very short on the pairs i tested with.. not realy worth for deep backtesting. (did not use bitcoin from avatrade though.. spread is insane, definately not the place for bitcoin trading. also 5/7 days open so no weekend data)

i try that and the history is very short on the pairs i tested with.. not realy worth for deep backtesting. (did not use bitcoin from avatrade though.. spread is insane, definately not the place for bitcoin trading. also 5/7 days open so no weekend data)

Gox no longer has 80% of the market. I just got an e-mail from them telling me they exceeded 1 million active accounts. There are a few million active cryptocurrency accounts (people who trade crypto) in the world (e.g. 10% of the Dutch have cryptocurrency wallets). And this number is dubbling every month.

Imagine that 5% of people who actively trade cryptocurrencies would start using MC:- you would have mess on the forum (thousands people asking silly questions)- feature request number would increase tenfold in a month.MC team with its streatched resources could not provide support without neglecting the traditional customer base. Do you want this?

Software that is lighter and easier to operate than MC is needed for crypto trading. And a team of developers (i) who are not afraid to constantly add new exchanges and (ii) who can add features not known in traditional / legacy trading would be a must. This can't be done by MC team without killing its existing product.

There is a need for a platform that will have not only one cryptocurrency (BTC), but also:- other cryptocurrencies (there are cryptocurrencies in development that have even bigger potential of growth than BTC, e.g. zerocoin);- other assets like cryptostocks, bonds (there are cryptosecurities exchanges).

bjornc wrote:new customers from bitcoin will buy multicharts if they like it.. (like me).

In this event there would be a danger of flooding this forum with many new members (that would potentially translate into a risk of neglecting the present customers) asking silly technical questions about MC and requesting that new exchanges (including distributed exchanges) and new asset types be added.

I bought my first bitcoins for close to $245 and today it is about $1,200 pretty good return for about 18 months. It is getting a lot more popular and accepted, trading at GDAX has plenty of liquidity and lot's of volume AND they have a good API. I have a couple strategies that would have performed very well over the last year or two.. It would be nice if Multicharts would add the API and we could use MC to trade bitcoin.

On another note, I thought that Multicharts was going to add Collective2 API. I see that there is a 3rd party solution available, but it is EXPENSIVE, costs more than I paid for my MC license. Any chance we could finally get Collective2 added?

jerryhd wrote:BarCharts, an MC data vendor, has supplied crypto data for months but as of early January 2018 MC has not updated their API to receive it.When will this be remediated?

Hello jerryhd,

Cryptocurrencies from BarChart and Poloniex are supported since MultiCharts 11.0 Release 6.Please run QuoteManager and go to Instrument-> Add symbol-> From Data source-> BarChart -> Cryptocurrencies.You will need to have BarChart account to receive the data from this feed.

Poloniex connection works without any credentials. Instruments should be added same way as described above for BarChart.

Thanks for adding cryptocurrencies to the new MultiCharts. This is exciting, but after playing a little bit with it, I'm left totally clueless about how the symbol settings and lot sizes should work for cryptocurrencies.

When I try to send signal orders to it, I got error message: "The currency for the BTCUSD @ BITFINEX instrument is not set." I set the currency to USD because it shows the value of BTC in USD. Maybe all xyzUSD cryptocurrencies should have USD set by default.

To understand BTCUSD symbol settings, I compare them with the ES (e-mini S&P 500) instrument. For example:

means:$50 is divided into 100 parts (BigPointValue * PriceScale) and a tick is 25 parts (MinMovement).Value of a tick is ($50 * (1/100)) * 25 = $12.50Unit of lots when sending orders is in ES contracts.

If Big Point Value is the price of 1 unit on the vertical scale in the currency of the symbol, then for BTCUSD we have:

$1 is divided into 100,000,000 parts (BigPointValue * PriceScale) and a tick is 1 part (MinMovement).Value of a tick is (1 * (1/100000000)) * 1 = $0.00000001Unit of lots when sending orders is in BTC.

Problems:

We don't want to scale $1 down to 100,000,000 parts but we want to be able to specify orders in microBTC or Satoshis which is 0.00000001 BTC.

Also, the IOrderMarket.Send(int numLots) method receives amounts only in integers. Nobody wants to trade cryptocurrencies in whole numbers. I may want to order to buy/sell 0.000025 BTC or even smaller.

How can I do that?

TL;DR: How can I send trade orders of cryptos with fractions?

I'm only trying to test some ideas. I know BITFINEXT API for trading is not available yet.

MultiCharts supports trading only by integer number of contracts. But as far as at the moment crypto trading is not available, you can do backtesting with a fractional BPV value. The minimal BPV that can be set is 0.00001. So in backtesting if your order is generated for 1 contract it will be equal to 0.00001 of BTC.